Roundup: Talking About History

Source: Japan Times
August 10, 2008

Roger Pulvers: Engineering a historical oblivion for soldiers of the wrong wars

My dad was a lucky man. Born in 1903, he was just too young for service in World War I and a bit too old for the same in World War II. Not that he couldn't have volunteered for the latter. He certainly could have, but decided not to. Many years ago, he gave me some papers associated with what was then called the Selective Service. I never took a close look at them, until now. There is his registration certificate from Feb. 14, 1942, issued by the Dade County local board

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
August 8, 2008

Daniel Walker Howe: What Hath God Wrought

[Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA. His books include What Hath God Wrought (2008 Pulitzer Prize winner) and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. This essay is based on his presentation at the FPRI Wachman Center’s May 17-18, 2008 history institute on America in the Civil War Era, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Wisconsin.] When I signed on to do m

Source: Japan Focus (Click here to see pictures accompanying this article and a longer piece examining the report's limitations).)
July 31, 2008

Geoffrey Gunn: Closed Book or Open Book on Indonesia and Timor-Leste? The Commission of Truth and Friendship Report on 1999 HR Violations

[Geoffrey Gunn, former advisor to CAVR on “international actors”, Is a coordinator of Japan Focus.] Officially received by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta at a ceremony on the Indonesian island of Bali on 15 July, the long awaited report of the joint Timor Leste-Indonesian Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF), set up in 2005, has received mixed reviews. On the one hand, by offering words of remorse the Indones

Source: Japan Focus (This excerpt is from a long article entitled: "Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies")
August 15, 2008

Mikyoung Kim: Why Japan is still struggling to tell its history

[Mikyoung Kim is Assistant Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute – Hiroshima City University. Before assuming her current position in 2005, she taught at Portland State University as Fulbright Visiting Professor. She previously served with the U.S. State Department from 2000 to 2004, specializing in U.S.-ROK-DPRK relations. Her forthcoming book, Securitization of Human Rights: North Korean Refugees in East Asia, will be published by Praeger in 2009.] ... Post-Cold War Japanese

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
August 17, 2008

Michael Johnson: Teaching About Slavery

[Michael Johnson is Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University. His books include Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War and Reading the American Past. This essay is based on his presentation at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers on America in the Civil War Era, 1829–77, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Kenosha, WI. See www.fpri.org/educat

Source: Observer (UK)
August 17, 2008

Helen Womack and Kate Connolly: Prague Invasion ... 40 Years On

[Helen Womack has written articles published in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Kate Connolly is the Guardian and Observer's Berlin correspondent, also covering central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia.] When the refrigerator mechanic and young conscript soldier Anatoly Babi was given the chance in the autumn of 1968 by his military superiors to 'see the world', he leapt at the opportunity. The son of peasant parents born in the Soviet repub

Source: Independent
August 17, 2008

Shaun Walker: Ethnic tensions ... War in the Caucasus is Stalin's legacy

[Shaun Walker is the Moscow correspondent of the Independent.] The Georgians are bombing South Ossetia; the Russians have come through the Roki tunnel to take Tskhinvali; a second front has been launched in the Kodori Gorge; the Russians have occupied Gori, Poti and Senaki. It's been a week where names and places that previously didn't register a blip on the Western consciousness have suddenly become headline news. Even most of the journalists covering the conflict, shipped in from

Source: Science Based Medicine
August 15, 2008

Mark Crislip: The History of Vaccines

We live longer than anytime in history. Our long lives are due in large part to good nutrition, sanitation, and vaccines. There have been numerous posts here and elsewhere about the vaccine deniers, primarily focused around the modern myth that vaccines cause autism. That is not the topic of this post. Instead, I am going to take a brief tour of the childhood vaccines and review the morbidity and mortality caused by vaccine preventable diseases and the efficacy of the v

Source: Guardian
August 15, 2008

Adam Michnik: Rattling the Kremlin's cage ... 40 years on

[Adam Michnik was one of the leaders of Solidarity and the founding editor of Gazeta Wyborcza.] What was the Prague Spring, or the events of 1968 more generally? Their meaning, it seems, has become more, not less, debatable with the passage of time. My generation was forged by protests and police truncheons, by the hopes generated not only by the Prague Spring, but also by the Polish student movement that March, the Paris events of May, and the first signs of Russian d

Source: Times Literary Supplement
August 13, 2008

Timothy Snyder: Nazism's dialectic of death

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in European and Russian Studies at Yale University.His most recent book, The Red Prince: The secret lives of a Habsburg Archduke, was published earlier this year.] Can a nationalist found an empire? The United States of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in the name of democracy, though any representative Iraqi government would have to oppose a foreign occupation. Russia under Vladimir Putin tries to impose its will o

Source: Times
August 13, 2008

Martin Fletcher: Omagh ... deadliest bombing of the Troubles remembered ten years on

[Martin Fletcher was appointed Associate Editor of the Times at the end of 2006.] Ten years ago on Friday Donna Marie McGillion was shopping in Omagh with her fiancé, Garry, his sister Tracey and Tracey’s daughter Breda, who was to be flower girl at their wedding the following week. At 3.10pm they were yards from a maroon Vauxhall parked in Market Street when it exploded, killing 29 people and two unborn babies in the deadliest atrocity of the Troubles. B

Source: Japan Times
August 10, 2008

Roger Pulvers: Engineering a Historical Oblivion for Soldiers of the Wrong Wars

My dad was a lucky man. Born in 1903, he was just too young for service in World War I and a bit too old for the same in World War II. Not that he couldn't have volunteered for the latter. He certainly could have, but decided not to. Many years ago, he gave me some papers associated with what was then called the Selective Service. I never took a close look at them, until now. There is his registration certificate from Feb. 14, 1942, issued by the Dade County local board

Source: Daily Mail
August 8, 2008

Why Was Saddam Hussein Haunted by the Brutal murder of Iraq's Boy King?

Waiting in a spartan, concrete-lined chamber at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in Kazimain, a north-eastern suburb of Baghdad, the 69-year-old fallen dictator Saddam Hussein, dressed in a black overcoat, stood on the trapdoor of the gallows. Found guilty of crimes against humanity during his 24 years as President of Iraq, he had been sentenced to death. But even now, in his last moments, he maintained his old defiance. Spurning the use of a black hood o

Source: National Post
August 5, 2008

Arch Puddington: Stalin, rebranded

[Arch Puddington is director of research at Freedom House and co-editor of Democracy Web, a curriculum guide sponsored by Freedom House and the Albert Shanker Institute that promotes the teaching of democratic values.] The Russian foreign ministry recently issued an indignant statement that takes issue with President Bush for equating communism with Hitlerism. "In the 20th century," a proclamation issued by Bush said, "the evils of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism we

Source: Sky News
August 5, 2008

Jeremy Thompson: Tiananmen Square ... 19 Years On

[Jeremy Thompson is a newsreader on Sky News.] Much of it looks the same. A vast, 99-acre expanse watched over by the stern gaze of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, and flanked by the monolithic, Soviet-style structures of the Great Hall of the People and the National History Museum. But today it was full of flowers and flags, a friendly gathering place for the Olympic visitors. In 1989 fires were still smouldering, wreckage strewn across the concrete slabs,

Source: US News
July 30, 2008

Kenneth T. Walsh: The Most Consequential Elections in History ... Abraham Lincoln's Victory in 1864 Led to the End of the Civil War

[Kenneth T. Walsh is the chief White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report.] On April 12, 1861, about five weeks after Abraham Lincoln's inauguration for his first term, Southern forces began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, starting the Civil War. On April 13, the Union forces surrendered, prompting jubilation in the new Confederacy and anger and disappointment in the North. The election of Lincoln, an antislavery moderate, had been the last

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
July 30, 2008

Jane E. Schultz: Ten Common Myths about Women in the Civil War and How to Dispel Them

[Jane E. Schultz is Professor of English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis and author of Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2004). This essay is based on her presentation at the FPRI Wachman Center’s May 17-18, 2008 history institute on America in the Civil War Era, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Wisconsin.] Twenty-five years ago, when I began to contemplate a dissertation topic concerni

Source: The Cutting Edge
July 28, 2008

Edwin Black: Infamous Auschwitz Tattoo Began as an IBM Number

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the forthcoming book, The Plan--How to Save America the Day after the Oil Stops— or Perhaps the Day Before (Dialog Press, September 2008). This essay was adapted from a 2001 article which originally appeared in the Village Voice and syndicated thereafter, which received the award for Best Investigative Article of the Year by American Society of Journalists and Authors.] In August 1943, a t

Source: Concord Review
July 30, 2008

Will Fitzhugh: High school students should be assigned the reading of history books

Katherine Kersten tells me that at Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minnesota, high school history students are required to read James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom [946 pages] and Paul Johnson’s History of the American People [1,104 pages] in their entirety. It seems likely to me that when these students get to college and find reading lists in their courses in History, Political Science, Economics, and the like, which require them to read nonfiction books, they will be somewha

Source: NYT
July 29, 2008

Harriet A. Washington: Apology Shines Light on Racial Schism in Medicine

[Harriet A. Washington is the author of “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday, 2007).] Organized medicine has long reflected that most American of obsessions: race. For well over a century, the American Medical Association has been the nation’s largest and most powerful physicians’ group — and an overwhelmingly white one. Black physicians have their own, lesser-known group, the National Medic